100,000 hits!

As you may have guessed from the title of this update we have hit a milestone: 100,000 hits! Yes www.baggieandlucy.com has received 100,000 views. This milestone is split over two servers, my original WordPress hosted site (still available as www.afrobaggie.wordpress.com) and the new (not so new now as I have been here for nearly a year) privately hosted site that is www.baggieandlucy.com. It took nigh on 19 months to reach the first 50,000 but the readership has obviously increased (as indeed has my frequency of article writing – though not this month!) and the second 50,000 hits have occurred over 17 months, but at this rate it will still take until Christmas 2035 to hit the million mark. Again as I mentioned at 50,000 hits it maybe only a small milestone that means absolutely nothing in the real word but it feels like a justification for the amount of work that I regularly put into this site. So thank you all for your interest in the ups and downs of our growing family.

There is also a second milestone linked to this update: the 100th post. This may sound like the second time that I have reached this milestone but the previous ton that I mentioned included the 9 major event pages. This is the 100th update since I begun the website, so one hundred little stories of Bagnall life! Again that represents quite an investment in time to sit at a keyboard and pour out the trials and tribulations of parenthood.

This latest update occurs against the busiest time of the year for me at work and the latest phase in our redecoration of the house. The English Premier League has kicked off, completing the hand of seasons bringing us to full speed. The start of this season has been considerably easier than the start of last but frankly it couldn’t have been that bad again. Then again we have not made such a technological leap forward as we did last year, although the spectre of 3D (or stereoscopic to be technologically correct) looms over us in the next couple of weeks. Saying that we have upgraded two of our studios to HD bringing the last of our areas up to the latest specifications and although there is still a hefty snag list their birth has been relatively pain free.

With the start of the season comes long hours at work and with a new flooring and redecoration comes disruption at home, which is unfair on the little ones. So in steps Nanny Fran to help. She was taking a week off work and offered to take Éowyn up to West Bromwich for five days so that Lucy could have half the workload while I was doing such long hours. So while the fitter was laying our new wooden floor Lucy drove to the relative safety of West Bromwich. Relative safety was something that seemed a little perverse when the riots that had been affecting mainly the London area spread across many metropolitan areas including West Bromwich. It is quite often nice to hear your home town mentioned on national television but not when it relates to something as negative as rioting and especially when your wife and two young daughters are in the vicinity with your Mom and kid sister! Fortunately apart from Poundland and Cash convertors West Bromwich emerged relatively unscathed however due to the positioning of the riots and the police attempting to prevent people from entering the riot area, two motorway junctions were closed. The two closest to my mom’s and the two that Lucinda knows. Hence she had a little detour and venture further into the West Midlands to find the way home.

Éowyn had fun at her Nanny Fran’s (it goes without saying) especially since she was centre of attention for a lot of the time but also got to play with Nanny Fran’s other ‘adopted’ grandchildren especially Jonti and Finn. Days out at the Safari park and soft play areas were high on her list. Éowyn takes after her dad in that she loves animals. She is especially fond of big cats, tigers being her favourite. She can tell the difference between Cheetahs and Leopards something many adults have difficulty with. While at the Safari park she saw white tigers, but not content with this colour variation she insisted that she wanted now to see a black one. In the same way that white tigers are not albinos (they still have stripes) so black tigers are not melanistic, however whereas many people have seen white tigers (there are some 200 or so world wide), black tigers are almost cryptozoological with only a scattering of reports throughout history, so Finn was quite correct when he replied to Éowyn, “They don’t come in black.”

She also did her family duties and paid visits both to her Great-Grandma and her Great Great Uncle Albert as well as entertaining some of Mom’s friends before heading back home on Saturday morning.

Amélie is really enjoying the new flooring. The wooden floorboards are not so harsh on her knees and she can slide across them easily. Although she still has this strange body-popping movement. Instead of the traditional hands and knees crawling stance she pulls herself forward with her arms and ‘caterpillars’ the rest of her body to make up the distance. Very cute. She is also everywhere. You turn around and she is right behind you or she is emptying her toy box on the floor. We had forgotten what this stage was like.

We had also had forgotten what a lack of sleep caused by a teething toddler can be like. Amélie has not had a decent night sleep for a month and a lack of sleep is difficult for everyone involved but I can only talk from my point of view of getting up and going into work, but it must be just as hard for Lucinda when she has the girls all day and Éowyn hasn’t been the most well-behaved of children of late.

I think Éowyn has come to realise that Amélie is here to stay and that means that she gets just a little less attention. And with me doing long hours, the house being disrupted with workmen and her sister now actively going after her things, I think she decided to exact a little revenge. She really did enter the terrible twos for at least a fortnight. I think things have begun to calm down a little now (with handy hints from Super Nanny) but it was not easy, especially when I was only seeing her for an hour or so a day and in that hour I would be making her sit on the thinking step or putting her to bed with no supper. It was an added stress that wasn’t needed. However she has been back to her good-hearted nature of late. Which is a relief for all concerned.

As you can guess from the dearth of good photos below (or should I say dearth of variety of photos below) or even the tales that have been regaled in this write up, life has been a little too work orientated for me and so I have not had the camera out as much or indeed spent too much time with the family which is always a little hard. So apologies and I will try to do better for next time (and not leave it so long!)